For most of this week, it seemed possible that the first Monday in October might come and go without the opening of the Supreme Court term, breaking a streak begun in 1917. “In the event of a lapse of appropriations,” the SCOTUS website said yesterday, “the Court will continue to conduct its normal operations through October 4.”

Today, however, the Court promises to be open for at least another week—which is good news for those who track the Constitution at a level slightly less fraught than debt ceiling nail-biting. This Term may be less dramatic than the past two, but the Court majority’s itch to do a little constitutional tinkering is already in evidence.

In October alone, the Court is scheduled consider new questions about the Equal Protection Clause, the law of campaign finance, and affirmative action. Here are the constitutional highlights of the October arguments:

Monday, October 7—Madigan v. Levin is a kind of warm-up game for the bigger cases the following week. The question concerns state employees who claim to have been discriminated against because of their age. That kind of discrimination is strongly forbidden—to government and to private employers—by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, passed in 1967. But it is also, so to speak, weakly forbidden to state governments in particular by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court has held that governments can discriminate by age if they have a “rational basis”—that is, a decent reason—for doing so. State troopers, for example, need to be fit; fitness declines with age, so a rule requiring retirement at 50 is okay for the state police. But the government can’t discriminate against the aging just because employers like having young folk around.

In May 2006, Lisa Madigan, attorney general of Illinois, fired Harvey Levin from her consumer protection division. Levin was 55 and says he was replaced by a lawyer in her 30s. He sued under both the ADEA and the Equal Protection Clause.

The Equal Protection claim is important for two reasons. First, Levin’s ADEA claim was thrown out of court because the act doesn’t protect personal staff or legal advisers of elected officials, and a federal court found that he was one. Second, even if he could proceed under the ADEA, he couldn’t win a judgment for his back pay. The Eleventh Amendment bars an ADEA action for money damages against a state. That restriction doesn’t apply, however, to a lawsuit under the Equal Protection Clause.

So the question is whether Congress intended to make ADEA the only way employees could sue for age discrimination. The Seventh Circuit held that it did not; all other circuits that have ruled on the issue have held that it did. In practical terms, the resolution will matter to thousands of state employees. It will also give another glimpse of the Court’s attitude toward civil rights and discrimination plaintiffs generally. Thus far, that attitude has been fairly grudging. (The latest cutbacks on sex-discrimination suits afforded minor fireworks at the end of last term, when Justice Samuel Alito now famously pulled a face during Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s reading from the bench of her dissent in one such case.)

A group of law professors has filed an amicus brief arguing that the Seventh Circuit improperly considered the constitutional-remedy issue. The Court could dismiss the case on those grounds, curing the circuit split by vacating the decision below but not resolving the issue. It may, however, prefer to settle it.

However, the conservative majority hates the idea of limits on money in politics, and three of its members—Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas—have written that the First Amendment protects the right to give money directly to candidates as strongly as it does the right to speak publicly about politics.

Enter Alabama businessman Sean McCutcheon. McCutcheon made contributions to 15 federal candidates in recent elections, and wishes to donate to 12 more (coincidently, those candidates will be conservative Republicans). He also wants to give $25,000 more to three Republican campaign committees. The amount per candidate is okay—federal law currently limits contributors to giving $2,600 per candidate; the amount per committee is higher but still limited. But the problem is what federal campaign-finance law calls “aggregate limits.” Those limits mean that no one person can give more than a total of $123,200 per two-year cycle to all candidates and committees nationwide. McCutcheon’s contributions will take him over that limit.

The limit was passed to prevent one donor from funneling money to committees that would funnel it to chosen candidates. With changes in the law, funneling is less of a problem, but the limit also operates to prevent any one donor from swamping the political system with direct contributions. (The Koch brothers, with a net worth of $36 billion apiece, could give the maximum to a candidate in every House and Senate race in the country for less than one year’s interest on one year’s interest of their net worth—not a bad price tag for a national legislature.)

In its recent cases, the Court majority has made clear its belief that government has no power to prevent rich people or groups from having “too much” political influence. The “aggregate contribution” limits seem likely to be struck down. The major question is whether, in doing so, the majority will signal that it is also ready to void all limits on contributions to individual candidates. This Court’s majority seems to be on a mission, but how far is it willing to go, and when?

Tuesday, October 15—Affirmative Action in higher education is a seemingly endless dialogue for this court. Neither side appears willing to understand the other side’s arguments, or even the Court’s own precedents. These cases (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. Bollinger, and Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin) are absolutely clear about one thing: The constitutionally permissible purpose of affirmative action is not and cannot be to “help” minority students—to help them overcome discrimination earlier in life, to combat possible subconscious racism in admissions programs, or to enjoy academic success once admitted to a college or graduate school.

Under the cases, the only permissible purpose for an affirmative action program is to enhance the educational experience for everyone. Schools may use limited racial preferences as a means of choosing among qualified candidates—but only in order to guarantee a diverse student body, because diversity improves all students’ educational experience.

In the murky world of constitutional law, few rules are clearer. But nobody really believes it. Affirmative action is seen on one side as a measure to guarantee inclusion for minority students—and on the other as an undeserved handout.

That tension is at the core of Schuette. The issue is not whether a university could abolish its own affirmative action program—there’s no question that it could. It’s whether a state’s voters can require all the state universities to abolish their programs, even if the schools and their governing boards think the plans are necessary for educational purposes. Grutter and Gratz involved the University of Michigan. Once the Court upheld the Michigan law school’s program, a citizens’ group qualified a ballot initiative that outlawed affirmative action at any public college or university in the state. The voters approved it in 2006.

The challengers, a student- and youth- based organization of school and community leaders, rushed to court to block the initiative from taking effect. The Sixth Circuit agreed with them. Its decision was based on two cases—one from 1969 and the other from 1982—that announced the “restructuring” doctrine. That doctrine holds that government may not deliberately change the political system to make it harder for minority groups to seek relief than for others. (One case concerned a referendum barring open-housing laws; the other was about a statewide referendum that voided the city of Seattle’s diversity-oriented voluntary school busing program).

But the “restructuring” doctrine applies only to programs that minorities might seek as means of self-help. Affirmative action, as a matter of law, cannot be such a program. It’s a matter of pure educational policy, like deciding on smaller class sizes or increasing the use of iPads, and it is to be made in the interest of the student body and the state as a whole, by those trusted with the discretion to make that decision. Those decision-makers are permitted to choose affirmative action; by no stretch are they required to.

If that is the law, what basis would there be for saying the legislature, or the people, can’t make that policy choice for all state schools? To me, the idea of a statewide vote closing the doors on minority-friendly programs raises all kinds of red flags. It smacks of what the Court in other contexts calls “animus”—the desire of a majority to hurt an unpopular group or groups, or prevent them from getting “too much” access to education.

But for my suspicions to find any echo in the caselaw, the Court would have to broaden, not narrow, its approval of affirmative action. That is really, really, really unlikely to happen. So unlikely, in fact, that I don’t see this case as a likely candidate for a 5-4 split.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.